This lecture was part of the Postsocialism & Art project led by Dr Nela Milic and Ewelina Warner.
"Beyond (post)communism. A decolonial glimpse into the art of the former Soviet 'colonies"
A predominant understanding of the art emerging from the former state socialist countries still firmly connects it with the communist legacy or its denial. This simplified narrow view fails to see other, no less important aspects of these art trajectories that often link with anticolonial and postcolonial artistic genealogies intersecting with problematized ideological differences. Decoloniality and critical indigeneity allow a more complex and nuanced view of this mostly overlooked art that falls through the habitual categories such as ethnic art or contemporary art. In this talk Tlostanova will focus on the works of several artists originating from the former Soviet national republics and their artistic ways to decoloniality.
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and writer, professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). She has authored over 180 articles and book chapters, 11 monographs and three novels translated into many languages. Her interests focus on decolonial thought, particularly in its aesthetic, existential and epistemic manifestations, indigenous feminisms and feminisms of the Global South, the postsoviet colonial human condition, fiction and art. Her most recent books include What Does it Mean to be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), A new Political Imagination, Making the Case (co-authored with Tony Fry, Routledge, 2020) and a forthcoming collection Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues, Intersections, Opacities, co-edited with Redi Koobak and Suruchi Thapar-Björkert (Routledge, 2021).